There were artists around me all my life. My mom, her mom, my dad, his sister. I heard the word artist and I looked at the work, the beginnings on the easel, and the framed pieces on the walls. Prudy, my mother, grew up influenced by her mother, Lora’s creativity. My grandmother enjoyed landscape painting and portraiture and her form of realism with oil paint had lots of careful detail from edge to edge. She and Prudy would take trips to Rockport and Gloucester to sketch and paint plein air.  From handling their early unsigned work stored in closets, I mostly but not always, could tell who’s work it was. Prudy’s work of similar subject matter to Lora’s had a little more fluidity and loose approach, sometimes working in oils, she leaned toward the medium of watercolor and pastels. They both loved creative writing and poetry.  

My father Richard, having served in the Coast Guard in WWII received GI Bill educational benefits which gave him the opportunity of vocational and technical training from The School of Practical Art in Boston. He learned Commercial Illustration, lettering and typography design as well as some fundamentals in Fine Arts. Prudy’s interest in Fine Arts and fashion design directed her to go to school for instruction landing her at the same school where they met and fell in love.

Richard’s sister, Betty, in my opinion, was the more accomplished painter of landscapes done in oils and watercolor. After attending a different school for fashion design, she settled in the other coast-side town of Rockport in Maine, the smaller and quieter village just outside of the lively touristy town of Camden. There, she worked in Real Estate finding a charming cottage-style house and big barn perched on a hill overlooking Rockport Harbor. She was prolific using her barn as a studio and produced numerous landscapes capturing time and seasons of her picturesque surroundings. Along with many pieces covering the walls of my dad’s family farmhouse in New Hampshire, one large, stunning oil painting of boatyard and shacks expressed with lovely colorful detail hung prominently in the living room. Betty also was proficient in reverse glass-painting, making miniature three-dimensional dioramas and a Peter Hunt style of antiquing furniture and objects with fanciful figures and floral patterns displayed on nearly every square inch of the quaint interior of her home. Dad also enjoyed decorating the inside of our Watertown house, a small suburb of Boston by the Charles River, and had fun painting doors, walls, cabinets and floors multi-colors and patterns, as well as being a skillful woodworker.

As a three-year-old, I barely sat still for my mother’s practice of portraiture, while I smelled turpentine and watched her dip brushes in and out of paint. Throughout my childhood she was creative in lots of ways, she made most of my school clothes and dressy outfits and painted a large mural in our kitchen of a stylized active street scene and constructed a mosaic of a well-endowed lounging mermaid on the top surface of a coffee table, as my father helped smash up colorful plates into tiny bits. She never minded when I explored the room she had made into a makeshift studio. I greatly admired her skill of intuitively capturing the accurate likeness and essence of a person. She could work fast, a talent acquired from joining the Art Fairs and Festivals circuit.  

I had no doubts I would be an artist too. There were a few aha moments that led to this conclusion, a second-grade art exercise of drawing some object at hand, I chose one of my well-worn, black ked sneakers of which the teacher notably raised her eyebrows in surprise at the resulting crayon rendering. And then simply finding great enjoyment and satisfaction from drawing pictures with pencil or pen-and-ink as an introverted, childhood pastime. My sister and brother had a strong inclination for art as well but decided it wasn’t going to be their life’s path as I did.

After his art education, my father got a job at Bucks Silkscreen Printing Company located in downtown Boston. After a time, Richard with his friend Joe, ventured on their own, setting up shop in our cellar. I often helped by swiftly placing wet prints onto layered metal racks for drying and sometimes having a go with the pull of a squeegee. As the business grew, my dad and now partner found space to operate in some interesting locations. The ground floor of the Waltham Watch factory was one and the next, the third floor of a building situated next door to the Saunders Castle at Park Plaza on Columbus Ave, Boston, eventually buying-out a long-established silkscreen company called Knowles. And after a few more years, they purchased a rustic tall and thin brownstone at the west end of Newbury Street that was once a horse and carriage livery with a wooden revolving floor inside for turning about.  I worked weekends and summers from the age of ten to twenty-five, learning all aspects of the business from answering the constant ringing of phones, filling out the work-orders to hand cutting stencils, working the oversized camera and darkroom, making the screens, running the presses, die cutters and stack cutters as well as delivering the finished product, becoming the epitome of a Boston Driver and knowing all the downtown secret parking spaces. However, with all these years of experience I never considered this job as a career and to their concealed disappointment, I would sometimes go off to try my hand at something different. After high school and after working for the Watertown Parks Department as an arts and crafts instructor, I had wanted to go to art school but my mother wished for me to broaden my interests and for a year and half I attended Boston State College. Not being able to fight my preoccupation in the direction of art, I applied to The Art institute of Boston, re-named from the same school my parents went to. I entered the program in print-making as Chip was graduating and similarly as my Parents beginnings, Chip and I met and fell in love.  

After I graduated, I found a job as a Production Assistant for a women’s athletic clothing store in Belmont. Mostly lifting bolts of stretchy fabric off trucks and onto shelves in the basement. The people were friendly and fun to be with until the owner suspected me and others of stealing some misplaced patterns.  Next was hearing about a teaching job at a small alternative high school for Emotionally and Behavioral Disabilities. I did not have certification but was hired for my experience with art, crafts, photography and community theater.  I taught sewing, leathercraft, and photography, quickly turning the restroom into a darkroom for each session. There were interesting field trips to factories, camping in NH and even an excursion to Montreal, Canada, with me taking long shifts driving the yellow bus. Funding ended after two years and two directors. At the suggestion of a friend, I applied to a modelling agency in Boston. At the same time, I started working for a photographer friend, organizing slides, dark room work, and assisting on photo shoots. Modelling was entertaining and for three years I met a lot of other photographers. I was hired for several commercial jobs, but mostly we helped each other enhance our “books”.  All the while I would end up at Knowles to help out, however, the hazardous fumes and toxic chemicals were a big  concern for me. Back in those days, it didn’t occur to anyone to put on a mask or even wear gloves, we just turned on a fan.

I had a short stint as a waitress in a small diner in Watertown Square when I was all of 15, so as I was looking for another job, I thought I would enter the glamorous and exciting world of waiting on tables again. The first place was a busy dive in Somerville where I learned my chops dealing with cantankerous cooks and customers and carrying large and heavy trays on my shoulder. The next phase of several years, was working for the fancy restaurant above the famous Cheers Bar across from the Boston Public Gardens as well as working part-time catering for Upstairs at the Pudding in Harvard Square. As the Cheers Bar and restaurant began transforming into an exclusively Cheers paraphernalia store, I was hired across the park at a modern-style establishment close to the theater district. Once I began working more of the coveted night shifts I had my days free to delve into creative projects. 

We had purchased a triple decker in Jamaica Plain and I proceeded to paint the blank walls, colors and concepts found in design magazines. I befriended the faux artist who had created the renaissance-style murals on the ceiling and the delightful, mottled effect on the walls of my current restaurants’ expansive chamber and one day I asked her if I could work for her company. All she asked me was “Do you like to travel?” Her small team and I drove up and down the east coast painting walls, floors and ceilings of a variety of stores and restaurants, including flying to other parts of the country. I was often on the tallest of ladders, scaffolding and scissor-lifts covering massive warehouse-size spaces implementing stippling, ragging, and blading techniques using paint glazes and venetian plaster. The highlight of my decorative painting career was being part of the restoration project for The John Singer Sargent Rotunda and Colonnade at The Museum Of Fine Arts. Chip also joined the team after tiring of construction and eventually he and I transitioned to working on our own by finding clients in Jamaica Plain and in Provincetown, the location of our second home investment.

We renovated this sweet cape farmhouse in Provincetown with Chip’s carpentry ability at rebuilding and repairing walls, floors and ceilings, as I proceeded to paint everything with a whimsical eclecticism.  Part of the property was income rental and once we retired from climbing ladders, volunteering for meals-on-wheels and the soup kitchens in town, I was able to continue to develop my own practice of painting landscapes, still-life and portraiture. 

Staying, for a time in the familiar and comfortable lane of realism, I felt a strong pull toward the abstract. Chip had already moved off from the traditional towards abstraction in his art practice by way of collage and encaustic, working very large and three-dimensional. I observed and admired his competence with these materials and soon set about in this new direction by integrating found collage items with pastels, dry pigments, acrylic house paint and plaster. I played and experimented on various surfaces, with textures I learned to execute as a faux painter, which I found very gratifying. 

I am, in great measure, a product of the people in my life. It feels very full circle, as the imprint of my family, all my teacher’s know-how of fine art and commercial art and all the processes and techniques imbedded in both sides of this   neurodivergent brain, are perpetually being expressed, onto my canvases, through me.